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Launched in January 2019, the Isaac Newton Institute now proudly hosts the “Kirk Fellowship” scheme. Designed to support and promote underrepresented groups in mathematics, the recipients so far are all women mathematicians of the highest seniority. In the first of a series of interviews, we spoke to the philanthropist whose generous six-figure donation has made the project possible: Dr Ewan Kirk.

On the evening of Tuesday 22 January 2019, the Institute was proud to host Poet-in-Residence John Kinsella for readings from his recent work "Spiralling".

Originally produced in 2017 as part of INI's 25th anniversary celebrations, the work is an exploration of spiral motifs and other mathematical themes richly suited to the environment in which they were performed.

Any previous visitor to the Isaac Newton Institute will be familiar with the 130 square metres of blackboards spread across the seminar rooms, shared workspaces, offices, lift interior and even the ground floor toilets. But how much use do these iconic fixtures see from the programme and workshop participants? The answer is: a very great deal. From September 2017 to June 2018 Institute staff left an emplaced camera programmed to capture regular images of one of the main mezzanine blackboards.

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Many recent and spectacular advances in the world of materials are related to complex materials having extraordinary and unique features, usually determined by their specific microstructure. Such materials are key to much technology appearing in our daily lives: they are in liquid crystal displays, in miniaturised phones, special steels in cars, plastics and composites in the construction of modern airplanes, in biological implants in human bodies, and so on. However, despite the impressive technological applications of these materials, the theoretical understanding and modelling of them are still inadequate.The need for models and basic understanding is not just of theoretical interest, but indeed a key requirement for being able to access and further develop the true potential of these materials, to optimise them, to combine them into new materials, and to use them for creating new devices, with predefined abilities and behaviours.

The rapid advance of renewable generation brings fundamental interdisciplinary research challenges. On shorter timescales there are increasing problems of control and optimisation, while new questions of physical and economic design are emerging on the longer investment timescales. Network flows must be managed reliably under uncertain demands, uncertain supply, emerging network technologies and possible failures and, further, prices in related markets can be highly volatile. Drawn from mathematics, economics and engineering, the interdisciplinary participants in this programme will address a range of associated problems, including modelling, prediction, simulation, control, market and mechanism design and optimisation. Our aims are both to develop methodology which is urgent for the next several years and to sow the seeds of a lasting mathematical research agenda.

Approximation theory is the study of simulating potentially extremely complicated functions, called target functions, with simpler, more easily computable functions called approximants. The purpose of the simulation could be to approximate values of the target function with respect to a given norm, to estimate the integral of the target function, or to compute its minimum value. Approximation theory's relationship with computer science and engineering encourages solutions that are efficient with regards to computation time and space. In addition, approximation theory problems may also deal with real-life restrictions on data, which can be incomplete, expensive, or noisy. As a result, approximation theory often overlaps with sampling and compression problems.